Secrets

What's he doing in there? Why is he working at this time on a Friday night? Why does he need a house-sitter anyway – what is it that takes him away? Shall I call down – is that the correct etiquette?

She ran the palm of her hand over the newel post as though it were a priceless orb. There was no female presence in this house, that was for sure – the dust and drabness attested to that. Hence the need for me, Tess thought, grateful.

As she soaked in the bath, alternating one big toe and then the other up inside the tap which was a long-held habit she found meditative, she wondered if running away hadn't just been easy, but actually a very good thing to have done. It was going to be a better life for Em, with all this space and fresh air. Tess told herself she was hurting no one and no one would miss her, really. She'd texted a couple of her friends and told them she'd be in touch, that she was going away for a bit, added the mandatory Txx so that they wouldn't worry. Tamsin would worry but she'd known Tess long enough to trust her and root for her. They'd probably assume she was going to Spain on a long overdue visit to her father. Or up to Edinburgh to see her older sister. She sank down in the bath, up to her chin. It was hot and her tired limbs needed it. She'd used a squirt of her shampoo for bubbles because she hadn't wanted to help herself to Em's all-natural, camomile-scented hypo-allergenic bath-soak with added baby-sensitive moisturizer. Tess's supermarket own-brand shampoo suited her needs just fine. Appley and fresh and satisfyingly foamy. What a day. All that driving. Here now – a new place. Unlike anywhere she'd ever been. Unlike anything she'd ever done. Sometimes – especially when she'd been low or trapped awake by her worries – she'd wondered about such houses but hadn't really expected them to exist.

When she finally climbed into bed half an hour later, she started to worry about the enormity of what she'd done, that she was in a huge house in the middle of nowhere and no one knew she was here apart from the man downstairs tucked away in his study. How stupid to have thought she could drive away from London and leave her secrets in the flat in Bounds Green. Then she told herself she was too tired to think but tired enough for her thoughts to run wild. Be sensible.

She turned on the bedside light, planning to formulate a list of queries for Joe, but caught sight of her mobile phone. The signal was scant. No messages or missed calls. She gave but a moment's thought before removing the SIM card and cutting it in half with blunt nail scissors. Then she turned off the light and lay in the darkness, soothed by the stillness. Eventually her eyes made their acquaintance with the shadows. Wardrobe. Drawers. Standard lamp from Em's room. Mirror from the back bedroom. Painting of a seaside pier. Lloyd Loom chair brought down from one of the attic rooms. Today's clothes heaped by the door to wash tomorrow. Across her body, under the bedclothes, the soft throw she'd brought with her which Tamsin had given her on her birthday. Just before she fell asleep Tess remembered the utility room. A whole room devoted to a washing machine and tumble dryer and ceiling-mounted airer with its pulley system. Off that was the boot room – just for footwear and coats. Imagine that. The lap of luxury. A house that had everything. Buckingham Palace had nothing on this. Bounds Green was far far away. This wasn't running away! This was a new start – a sensible thing to do. An excellent idea! Brave, too. Tess felt utterly liberated.

Joe went to bed stiff and tired. He'd worked until two in the morning. He climbed halfway up to the second floor, observed how the doors were closed on the rooms that were empty, but were ajar on the rooms now occupied. He liked that. Usually house-sitters barricaded themselves in at night. This woman was open. Then he told himself to stop being soft – the baby hadn't slept on her own before and the mother would need to hear her in an instant. And as he tucked down on the floor below, he thought, where there's a baby and a mother – then there's most usually a father, isn't there? And he wondered, for a moment, who he was. And where. And why wasn't he here with them? Was he on the scene? Or was he the reason Tess had suddenly turned up on his doorstep, babe in arms?

A girl and her tot in his house was one thing, a whole bloody family unit would be quite another. Boyfriends lounging around and playing man of the house were not on the job description. And then he touched upon the fact that little over twenty-four hours ago, he had not known this woman at all. And he still didn't. Yet here she was, without references, without even giving him her surname. Here she was in his house having brought her life into his home.

She can make changes to a couple of the rooms, he thought, but that's it.

Chapter Three

Joe came into the kitchen, still fugged from a heavy sleep. He was wearing pastel-striped pyjama bottoms, the same woollen socks from yesterday, and a T-shirt. Tess glanced at his arms and thought, he has a tan – in March.

‘Morning,’ he said. ‘Been up long?’

‘Since the crack of dawn,’ Tess answered curtly. ‘I'm not used to everything being so quiet everywhere. The dog's been sick – does it happen often?’

He looked at her, standing there with her hands on her hips and a tea towel he knew wasn't his slung over her shoulder, her sleeves rolled up as if she was ready to fight.

‘Where?’

‘I've cleaned it up,’ she said. ‘I wasn't going to leave it there.’ She folded her arms. She looked peculiarly defiant and Joe found he didn't know what he was meant to say but felt she was waiting for an apology and fast.

He glanced at the clock and then regarded Wolf who didn't look like a dog that'd just been sick. The dog was engrossed in a hearty lick of his nether region, his tail spread across the kitchen floor like a length of old frayed rope. ‘Sorry – I overslept. I don't usually. And no, Wolf isn't sick often. You should have left it for me to deal with.’

‘What – with Em around?’

Now he felt guilty – as if he'd brought a lack of hygiene into the home of a child. Ridiculous – this was his house, wasn't it! And only her first day. He looked over at her sternly but she shrugged and popped her hair into a pony-tail. He'd quite liked her spirit yesterday – but not this morning when he'd just woken up.

‘It's not a problem,’ she said as if she sensed his reservation. ‘I just thought you needed to know.’ Now her equanimity made Joe feel a different sort of guilt, which was just as unnerving. All the more so when Tess then handed him a cup of tea in the china cup and saucer she'd left outside his study last night and he'd left, unwashed, in the sink. He sipped, giving himself time to think, but he was distracted as much by the unblinking attention of the infant as by the very good cup of tea.

‘So, you haven't done this job before?’

‘No – it's a brand new adventure.’

He thought she must mean venture. ‘What did you do in London?’

‘Nails.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Manicures, pedicures.’

He glanced at her nails. They were unspectacular, unvarnished and there was a Mister Man plaster around one. If these were the tools of her trade, they were not a particularly good advertisement. Manicures and pedicures? He didn't feel such a career could have suited her. He reckoned she looked more like a potter, or a photographer's assistant, or a landscape gardener at a push. He couldn't see her in a salon. She was pretty behind her slightly unkempt exterior – but her hair didn't have a particular style, her clothes were nondescript, asexual, and well worn. The lace of her left trainer was shorter than that of the right – the bow being tied on the penultimate eyelets. He thought, OK – fashion is not her thing. He thought, she hides behind her hair. He thought, you wouldn't notice her if you passed her on the street. He thought, perhaps that's a look she's honed.

There's more, Joe thought, noticing a twitch of discomfort cloud her face. A nail-person, whatever they're called, doesn't stand there fidgeting with her own – it's bad for business.

‘Well, actually, I'm trained as a beautician,’ Tess pre-empted, ‘a beauty therapist. Highly qualified, in fact.’

‘I'm not sure there's much call in Saltburn,’ Joe told her. ‘There are a couple of salons already. You might have luck further afield.’

‘But now I'm looking for a change and that's why I'm here,’ she said, as if she'd been mid-sentence.

‘A change?’

‘That's why I'm here,’ Tess said and she folded the tea towel briskly to signify the matter was closed.

‘Well – welcome to your first day. I need to go through my diary with you.’

‘Of course,’ Tess said, ‘but perhaps when Em has her nap after lunch.’

‘Well, actually I would rather—’

‘I ought to figure out where I am,’ Tess interrupted and Joe, to his bafflement, found himself saying, OK, get your coat and I'll show you around town.

Joe had overslept, for the first time in his adult life. Strangely, the sound of someone else was less intrusive than the usual silence. It was as if, with the clatter and attendance of someone else in the house, Joe could sleep longer. He hadn't yet checked a single email. Nor had he shaved because the hot water had sputtered lukewarm in his shower. And when he walked into the kitchen, he was met with a reprimand for his vomiting dog and a change to the order of his day.

‘Joe?’ She was calling him. ‘Five minutes? Ten?’

Twenty would have suited him but he agreed to ten.

Tess had driven in daylight but her urgency to arrive at the destination had precluded any appreciation, or awareness even, of the new landscape. The drive had been arduous, it had all felt interminably uphill from London; even through the monotonous flatlands of the Fens and the plains around York, she'd still sensed she was climbing north. She had never driven such a distance and her eyes had continually darted to the fuel gauge. She needed the journey to be done on what she had in the tank. But having never been further north than Milton Keynes, she didn't know how to judge it. It had added stress to the journey, but not enough to warrant thoughts of retreat. ‘Space, Em,’ Tess had said, over and again. ‘Proper space.’

And this is the sentiment she is repeating today as she walks down the drive with Joe. Em in her buggy. Wolf loping circuitously alongside.

‘It wasn't the pollution or the second-hand aspect of London air and water,’ Tess tells him, ‘I just felt hemmed in. There are places – in the city – where the buildings are so tall and packed they appear to converge and steal a part of the sky.’

‘Living place plotted and pieced by subdividing space into a size that is simply sufficient,’ Joe says and it is so perfectly phrased that Tess stops to consider it. ‘Paving stones butting right up against tree-trunks.’ He's walking on. She catches up so she can listen. ‘People living on top of you, underneath you, crowding into you on buses, pushed up against you on tubes, encroaching on your personal space but avoiding eye contact at all costs.’

‘But how do you know this?’

‘I lived there too. When I was studying. A century ago,’ he laughs. ‘I lived in Peckham.’

‘From here to Peckham? What is there to study in Peckham?’

‘Peckham – because it was a cheap place to live,’ he says. ‘I studied Design. And then I studied Engineering. Not because I wanted to be an eternal student. But because I knew what I wanted to do.’

‘Are you doing it still?’

‘Yes.’

‘What is it that you do?’

‘I build bridges,’ he says.

‘As a metaphor? Are you a counsellor? Marriage guidance – that kind of thing?’

Joe laughs and she looks cross that he should. ‘No – real bridges, the type that go from A to B. Bridges that span valleys and rivers and cross divides. Bridges that enable one to traverse air and water; bridges that take you closer to the sky or allow you to skim the sea. Bridges that join and unify places otherwise kept apart, that pacify areas previously hostile.’

Tess is struck, again, by his turn of phrase. She recalls that photo on the Welsh dresser. Perhaps it was San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge? She's embarrassed to ask. She knows nothing about bridges. In fact, she's probably always taken bridges for granted, having grown up in the shadow of Brunel's mighty Clifton Suspension Bridge. She decides she likes Joe's passion for his job, how it obviously enhances his life. She feels gently envious. She had similar passion once that she'd ploughed into a Small Business Loan, but that verve and the funds are long gone. Nothing remains. Nothing of anything apart from those bloody boxes in the back of the car and the weight of it all on her shoulders. She glances at her nails now and alters her grip on the buggy so she doesn't have to see them. The whites of her knuckles will have to do instead.

‘It's nice here,’ she says, priming her gaze outwards to blank out thoughts of London that have suddenly slid around her like a coarse scarf pulled too tight. They are walking downhill steeply; the street is residential but quiet, with grand Victorian buildings to their left, while lush and wooded land delves down sharply into a valley to the right, the land climbing up to the cliffs beyond. A little way ahead lies the North Sea, a motionless grey slab from this distance; on the horizon a tanker looking like a toy. Tess slows her pace, giving little tugs at the buggy. On the right, just before the woods roll downwards, a war memorial, a bandstand, a playground with a view. And an intriguing sign for Italian Gardens.

‘There's a miniature railway,’ Joe is saying. ‘It runs from the gardens to the sea.’ And then he tells her, just wait until the summer.

‘Hear that, Em,’ Tess leans forward awkwardly over the buggy, ‘a train to the sea.’ And to herself she says, hear that – he'd like me to house-sit until the summer.

She really likes his accent and she really likes what he's said.

‘You can also take a lift down to the pier.’

‘A lift?’

‘A water-balanced cliff lift. Eccentric Victorian ingenuity. You'll see.’

‘Did you grow up here, then?’

‘I did.’

‘And apart from your student days in London, you've lived here, you'll never leave.’ It is not a question. She says it as a statement, as if she wants it to be true.

‘Yup. I'm tied to the place all right,’ Joe says.

‘You make it sound a burden. I'd love to own a house half as beautiful and half the size as yours. Do you have family here too?’

But Joe has already bristled inwardly. Why is he doing this? Why is he walking with her? Why didn't he just give her the map and the info pack he'd prepared for house-sitters? In fact, why didn't he give it to her last night? Or leave it on the stairs when he realized she'd gone to bed. Why does she want to know about his family? Enough! A more informal set-up than he's used to in his house is one thing – but personal history is another. It has nothing to do with what's in the fridge or the hot-water system or the fact that the boot-room door to the garden needs a shove to open and a tug to shut.

Anyway, missy, what about you? he's tempted to say. You and your child up here on a day's notice? He lobs a stick into the copse and Wolf streaks off to fetch it. House-sitters shouldn't ask so many questions, Joe wants to say though he can't deny he has some of his own. It's not part of the job, he wants to point out. He ought to have stayed home this morning, he ought to have made it plain that the only time his life should be of any concern to her will be clearly written on the calendar. She can consult it to know when he is due back and when he is off again so she can organize milk and bread and other basics. But he doesn't say any of this – he knows it sounds too harsh. However, that just makes him wonder if he's soft to think so.

What had possessed him not to ask for references? Most people wanting the job had presented them to him before even looking around. Pages of testimonials praising their hygiene and trustworthiness and responsibility and experience. He glances over his shoulder; she's lagging behind again, pointing things out to the baby though the baby appears to be asleep. It's difficult to tell, under the swaddling of hat, scarf, blanket, mittens and foot-cosy all made from spongy cerise fleece.

‘Look! Plane!’

She says it out loud, automatically, as if she is conditioned to conversing only with her child. As if she has been unused to adult company and conversation, down there, wherever it was that she'd come from in such a hurry. Joe looks up at the plane and his antagonism wanes a little. She does seem genuinely enamoured of the house and the remit of the job. She has mopped up dog sick and she does make a good cup of tea. How is she to know about which of his raw nerves not to touch?

Joe decides the best option, for both their sakes, is to keep the conversation anodyne. He sees he has the very opportunity, spread out in all its faded Victorian splendour in front of them. This woman doesn't know Saltburn-by-the-Sea but he does. In a few days he'll be out of the country. He does need to go through his dates with Tess but OK, it can wait until Emmeline's nap. He also needs to go the bank and Wolf is straining for a good blast on the beach. En route however, there is plenty to politely point out – landmarks for Tess, an opportunity for Joe to de-personalize the conversation.

Tess has now caught up with him. ‘These buildings are stunning,’ she says, ‘they'd cost a fortune in London.’

‘Good old Henry Pease,’ Joe says. ‘He was the Victorian gentleman who came for a walk, sat on the hillside over there overlooking Old Saltburn's single row of cottages and the Ship Inn and had a vision for the town and formal gardens you now see.’

‘Why isn't it called Pea-on-Sea then!’

‘Pease,’ Joe repeats but he has to smile. ‘Actually, Saltburn comes from the Anglo-Saxon Sealt Burna, or salty stream, on account of all the alum in the area. But moving on a few centuries – Henry Pease built the place with George Dickenson of Darlington in the 1860s. They constructed a model of homogeneity – uniform roof lines in slate, white firebricks exclusively from Pease's own brickworks, and no fences.’

‘You have a fence,’ Tess says. ‘You have a tall wall with a fence on top all the way around.’

‘The house is from a later period,’ Joe says, thinking she is an argumentative thing. ‘Anyway, twenty years later the town was done – the station complex, the Valley Gardens you've just passed, the chapel, the pier and the cliff lift which back then was a glorified hoist. Best of all the Zetland Hotel – see, over there? Isn't it magnificent? It's flats now – but it was the world's first railway hotel and very grand it was too, with its own private platform. Pease's father built the Stockton and Darlington Railway – the first passenger railway in the world.’

‘It's a very good-looking town,’ Tess says, thinking how her own family had so little to be proud of.

‘That's partly because when Pease died in 1881, the Saltburn Improvement Company was disbanded and the town's driving force was gone – so no new features were added and the resort has remained a sort of time capsule, a perfectly preserved Early Victorian seaside town.’

‘Like a living museum.’

‘You should see it in August during the festival – everyone dresses in period costume. Well, not everyone.’

‘Not you.’

‘No, Tess – not me.’

‘I'd like to.’

‘Don fancy dress?’

‘No – see it in the summer!’

‘You should be here over Christmas – there's a tradition of running into the sea.’

‘Oh. Do you do that?’

‘I have been known to.’ He looks at her. She seems concerned. ‘It's not obligatory.’

‘It's just I don't really like beaches all that much.’

Joe continues to look at her; again she is irritating yet intriguing in equal doses. What an odd thing to say – not least on account of her impromptu beeline for Saltburn. ‘Why ever not? And why come here, then?’

‘You said sea views.’ And once again, she's implying that Joe is guilty of misrepresentation.

‘Who doesn't like beaches?’ Joe says because the beach is clearly in view now. The tide is out and the view is stunning: the sand is long, wide and glossy and the North Sea is now licked with silver and scattered with diamonds while the pier marches on its cast-iron trestles almost 700 feet out.

‘Me,’ Tess says. ‘I don't like beaches.’

Two surfers ride the waves, weaving in around each other like shuttles on a loom. Wolf is at the shoreline already, barking at them but apparently loath to get his paws wet. Joe passes a tennis ball from hand to hand. ‘Coming?’

Tess looks at the beach cursorily. ‘I think I'll stick to dry land. I think I'll explore the town.’

Joe shrugs. ‘I'm going to the bank after I've tired out Wolf. I'll see you back at the house. Can you find your way? It's straight up there. Shit – you don't have keys. Here, take mine.’

‘Say you're back before me?’

‘I won't be. You'll know town inside out in the time it'll take me to walk half the beach. Pick up some milk, would you?’

There's a plunge to her gut as she realizes she has brought no money. Rice cakes, a beaker, baby wipes, nappies, a spare hat, two cardboard books and a squeaky toy. But no money.

‘I left my purse at home,’ she calls after Joe who is already tormenting Wolf by feigning to throw the ball. The wind, though, snatches her words away. ‘Joe!’ He turns and cups a hand to his ear. She pulls the empty pockets of her jacket inside out and gives a mortified shrug. He jogs across the beach back to her, Wolf bounding and lurching and leaping at his arm in desperation for the ball which Joe holds aloft like the Olympic flame.

‘I left my purse at home,’ Tess says when he's close. ‘Sorry.’

She looks acutely embarrassed. Joe throws the ball for Wolf and passes Tess a pound coin and says, don't spend it all on sweets. As he heads back for the shore, he recalls how she said she'd left her money at home. He liked that. Hers are undeniably a rather odd pair of hands – this manicurist with the chipped nails from London – but Joe senses they are a safe pair and that in them, his house and all that is in it will be fine. He can go to France on Wednesday without a backward glance. In fact, he might even head off early. Perhaps tomorrow. See if Nathalie is around.

Chapter Four

Tess kept the pound coin tightly in her hand though it made pushing the buggy awkward. Though Joe had mentioned the pay, he hadn't told her when she'd be paid, but she expected it would be in arrears. Which meant no income for a month. Which meant she really was going to have to phone her sister at some point soon. But at that moment, she let the practicalities drift out to sea and she turned her undivided attention inland, to the new town before her. Tess had been in London for a decade, gradually becoming inured to the challenges of the big city; learning not to be intimidated by its scale or bothered by her anonymity. However, on her first full day away from London, Tess found the smallness of Saltburn quite startling. The pavements felt narrower. The cars appeared to move slower. It all felt quiet and empty. There was a total absence of the familiar coffee chains and though she had often cursed their proliferation in London, it made Saltburn seem half asleep. Wake up and smell the coffee, she felt like calling out. But actually she felt a little shy and too conspicuous to cast her gaze too far afield, so all she spied in her first glances was a newsagent, a grocers, an off-licence, butcher, baker, gift shop and chemist. There also appeared to be a startling lack of the gaudy homogeneity to which she'd become accustomed in London. As a child, Tess had visited Bekonscot Model Village and now she felt she was walking around a life-size version. On that first morning, Saltburn seemed quaint and odd in equal doses. However, people were undoubtedly friendly as she passed by, giving her a nod or offering her a quick word, counteracting her private misgivings of blimey, is this it? She wouldn't phone her sister, not today. Let today be full of promise.